Contemporary Literature Press,
under The University of Bucharest,
in permanent conjunction with The British Council, and The
Romanian Cultural Institute,

Announces the publication of

A Lexicon of the German in Finnegans Wake by Helmut Bonheim.

Edited by Lidia Vianu, with an Introduction by Jalaja Bonheim

(ISBN 978-606-8366-16-6)

Contemporary Literature Press has opened the series entitled Finnegans Wake Lexicography. The series began with A Lexicon of Romanian in FW, by C. George Sandulescu. It now continues with Helmut Bonheim's Lexicon of the German.

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882, and died in Zurich in 1941. Having written Ulysses in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, he was curious of languages other than his own all the time he was writing Finnegans Wake. The last page of his Finnegans Wake Manuscript is a mysterious fair copy of "the Forty Languages": English, Irish, Norwegian, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Esperanto, Volapuk, Novial, Flemish, French, Italian, Burmese, Basque, Welsh, Roumansch, Dutch, German, Russian, Breton, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Kisuaheli, Swedish, Spanish, Persian, Rumanian, Lithuanian, Malay, Finnish, Albanian, Icelandic, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Ruthenian, Hungarian

Helmut Bonheim began his research on Joyce in the early 1960s. He taught for a long time at the University of Cologne, where he became Head of the English Department. His Lexicon was initially published in 1967. The book appears in facsimile now. It is accompanied by a short introduction by the author's daughter, Jalaja Bonheim, a Ph.D. in English literature herself.

The present book also includes C.G. Sandulescu's explanation of the "Formal Structure of Finnegans Wake", and two essays by him: one on the technique of reading meaning into Joyce's use of the forty languages (among which German, of course), which Sandulescu calls "cartouching"; the other, which ends the volume, has a self-explanatory title, "Joyce cet inconnu".

This series of FW Lexicons will go on. It originates in the list of the Forty Languages, whose relevance to Joyce's text has not been fully explored. Not yet.

As the Scandinavia specialist Dounia Bunis Christiani used to say as far back as half a century ago "there is a lot of polyglot poetry in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake".

The volume A Lexicon of the German in Finnegans Wake, by Helmut Bonheim, will be officially launched on 7 December 2011, but it is available for consultation and downloading on receipt of this Press Release, at the following internet address:

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